Emma Watson and the Red Dawn Remake

The Red Dawn Remake: Potentially the Worst Idea Ever in the History of Cinema Unless it Starred Emma Watson.

Have you seen this? HAVE YOU SEEN THIS SHIT! That eighties classic, Red Dawn, the perfect storm of Cold War paranoia, teen movies and badassery is being remade and updated. If you have never seen Red Dawn, then you are seriously missing out, in a kind of retarded way.

Red Dawn is basically an 80’s teen movie. It’s got a lot of attractive people, the young stars of the time. It’s got a football team, family issues, flirting and bonding, executing traitors, riding around in the trays of pickup trucks. The plot is this America is invaded and partly taken over by the Soviets and the Cubans. In this one American town some of the local football team, The Wolverines(!) and a couple of girls escape to hide out in the mountains. Slowly, they begin to fight back and they lead a successful guerrilla campaign against the Commie scum, which ends in death and disaster for the most part. And awesomeness, it also ends in awesomeness.

Clearly, it’s right wing propaganda, an alarmist piece about how the commies are JUST AROUND THE CORNER! WAAAAAGGHHH. This was 1984. The Soviet Union didn’t even see out the decade intact, let alone invade its rival. Let alone stage a poorly thought out, extremely choppy invasion. Here’s the opening scene.

Yes, you did just see Swayze hauling people into his truck. As in Patrick Swayze one of the coolest dudes, well, not alive anymore. Sorry Patrick. I do miss you.

The film is generally celebrated for the part where, after killing a shit ton of Ruski’s, one of the boys raises his gun and yells, “WOLVERINES!” which I now do, whenever something awesome happens. This bit, I mean.

By the way, in addition to the Swayze, the film also featured Charlie Sheen, Dirty Dancing’s Jennifer Grey, The Hitcher’s Thomas C Howell and Back to the Future’s Lea Fucking Thompson. All are equally badass. They not only are a pain in the Ruski’s Communist behind, but they seem to single-handedly drive them out of the area. I mean, they kill platoons of the motherfuckers. You haven’t really seen a movie, until you’ve seen Marty’s Mom from Back to the Future opening up with an M60.

But here’s the terrible, no-good, bad, awful, worst idea ever.

The remake of Red Dawn. Sorry, the remake and update of Red Dawn. Yes, this 80’s Cold War Paranoia piece, this extremely specific time period piece is being remade and updated. The bad guys this time, in our imaginary dangerous world? The Chinese.

What. WHAT! Do have any idea how utterly retarded that is. Ok, so China and the US don’t get on fantastic, but they sure as hell aren’t enemies. In fact, China is one of the US’s biggest trading partners and vice versa. If China was going to invade anyone, it would be Russia, for crying out loud. This is especially ironic when you consider that China was an ally of the US in the Original Red Dawn, despite having much more reason to fight the US then than they do now.

Though, true to form, they’re casting a number of relative unknowns in this film. For many of the original cast, this was their first or second big part, and the same is true here. That has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that it’s going to be completely awful.

Not even the addition of Emma Watson would make this movie a good idea, even though that casting decision makes sense. Hear me out. The stars of the Original were mostly stars of relatively wholesome films. I think you could guarantee that none of Jennifer Grey’s other roles involved booby trapping herself if she was killed. Or that very few of their films involved brutally and suddenly executing someone in their group who had lead enemy troops towards them.

NOBODY PUTS BABY IN A MOTHERFUCKING CORNER!

Hence, if Emma Watson was in this film it would be the perfect opportunity to shed any remaining Hermoine typecasting that might come about. Granted, it would also be a blow to her career, but she has enough money and smarts to bounce back from that. And I’m not saying it would be hot to see her shoot people, but I could see her pulling it off. She can get pretty mad, as we have seen Granger do, or I have seen her do when she caught one of my spies and had her bodyguard slam his head in a car door, which was pretty funny.

However, I sincerely wish that this remake never existed. And that they don’t ruin my yelling of WOLVERINES!